Brown lawns

By DAVID TELLER

Staff Reporter

What started out as a routine maintenance project on a well, has resulted in burnt, tired looking landscaping at Eastern Washington University.

EWU associate vice president of facilities and planning Shawn King said he thought it was simply a matter of fixing a well pump with a short turn around, but he quickly found out he was wrong.

King said the problem surfaced when the maintenance department noticed a problem in pumping rates on well No. 1, which is next to Showalter Hall.

“Our normal pumping rates were decreasing,” King said. “We thought there might be a problem with the pump itself.”

Maintenance discovered the problem during the late arrival of spring, over three months ago. King said the campus could operate comfortably on one well during the non-irrigation season. Since the problem was discovered before the irrigation season began, the maintenance department decided to have the pump removed to see what was wrong with it.

EWU hired H 2O Well Service of Hayden Lake, Idaho, to remove the pump and render a diagnosis. King said the pump developed “some kind of vibration,” which was transferred to the pump’s shaft and eventually affected the gear teeth on the shaft, causing them to wear prematurely.

“It was actually slipping,” King said.

He said the next step was buying a new pump and replacing the damaged shaft that connects to the pump. He said a new pump had to be ordered, which took more time.

Since the 118 year-old well was not in operation, King said it was an ideal time to go in and do a cleaning process, which entails cleaning debris from the fractures in the rock to increase water flow.

EWU hired NW Hydrofracturing to inject an Environmental Protection Agency approved solution into the well. Afterward testing is conducted to ensure the well is clean, however, testing revealed the bacteria levels were above the levels the Washington Department of Public Health allowed for drinking water.

Bacteria in the well is not a result of the maintenance work. King said it is a trait of the ground in this area.

“It’s something coming through that is naturally occurring in the soil,” he said.

R.C. Worst & Co. of Coeur d’Alene, supplied and re-installed the submersible pump. After the well was repaired, they began chlorine disinfecting to kill the bacteria and then flushing the chlorine out again. King said that process consumed a bulk of the time getting the well usable again. During that time, the campus notified everyone they were curtailing irrigation. He stressed the top priority was keeping the drinking water safe and having adequate fire flow.

“We can’t draw (our storage tank) down below a certain level or we won’t meet our fire flow requirements,” King said. “Basically we just told people it’s going to be dry for a while.”

Anatek Labs, in Spokane, and AAA Lab in Cheney determined the satisfactory bacteria levels in the well, which passed testing two consecutive times before it went back into use, which King expected to be much quicker than it turned out to be.

The campus is working toward other water conservation measures. King said EWU is in the process of retaining a water conservation consultant for other projects on campus.

“We are in the process right now of getting a consultant on board to take a view at the campus broadly on water conservation issues,” King said.

He added EWU’s well system is pretty tight, it doesn’t leak but he wants to examine some of the equipment on campus and possibly changing landscaping philosophy to be more conservative.

David Teller can be reached at [email protected]